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.Certainly, turf wars and drug deals add hundreds of victims to urban slaughter.Force generates force; war breeds counterwar.The prisons are jammed top to bottom with men and women convicted under drug laws.cx Is this really the only way?16THE MECHANICS OF POWER: SOME TWENTIETH-CENTURY ASPECTSThe Modern PoliceThe master trend in police history has been toward what we have called, somewhat loosely, professionalization.It is no longer the case that anybody who knows an alderman and is young and reasonably healthy can become a police officer.Even in the nineteenth century, there was a trend toward upgrading police work, training the men, and holding them to certain standards.This trend continued in the twentieth century.Police work has also become far more specialized.The job itself got harder, more complex.For one thing, as time went on, there was more to it than strolling around the streets with a billy club.The old-time policeman or detective did not have to know much of anything about crime-fighting devices.There was no such thing as forensic science.There were no radios, no telephones, no equipment of any kind.Scientific detection was, essentially, a twentieth-century invention.The Bertillon system (as we have seen in chapter 10) came in toward the end of the nineteenth century in Europe; and fingerprinting followed close on its heels.A detective from Scotland Yard demonstrated the technique at the St.Louis World’s Fair, in 1904.St.Louis established the first fingerprint bureau in America.1The automobile also had an important impact on the policeman.The ordinary cop had once simply trudged his way through his “beat”; by the 1960s, he (or she) was far more likely to be sitting in a patrol car—so much so, that in the eighties there was a move to get the police out of their cars and back onto the sidewalks.Radios, telephones, and walkietalkies became standard equipment for police.In the early thirties, systems of radio communications were set up in cities all over the country.In 1934, Cincinnati established a modem crime laboratory, with ballistics equipment, X ray, and a polygraph, among other things.In 1935, the police department of Kansas City, Missouri, put two-way radios into patrol cars.2Inevitably, such “improvements” changed the nature of police work.A cop on foot was a familiar cop, a neighborhood cop; he knew his beat, and the beat knew him.He was also pretty much on his own.Headquarters was far away; he was beyond its beck and call.But now a ton or more of steel separated the motorized officer from the community; police cruising in patrol cars were strangers to the dark, dangerous streets; these police tended to feel alien, beleaguered; the locals, for their part, thought of them as an outside, occupying force.A policeman in a car, moreover, was, for the most part, a “reactive” patroller.He went where he was “dispatched.” Mr.and Ms.Public called the police, perhaps on an emergency line.Headquarters radioed to officers in cars, telling them where they were needed.Consequently, the police spent less time “trawling” for drunks, disorderly persons, and the like.3 At the same time, the new communications technology made it easier for headquarters to control and to monitor patrolmen from a distance.Rank and file police drew closer to headquarters, but further psychologically and socially from the men, women, and children in the area they were supposed to patrol.4This increase in social distance was in a way inevitable.Technology should not get all the blame.Americans have always been rolling stones.In the twentieth century, more and more, they tended to roll from the countryside into the big cities; and from neighborhood to neighborhood, and city to city.It was a transient population, more and more suspicious of authority.Police were especially distant, socially speaking, from the folks who lived in the most crime-ridden and problematic areas.They were also likely to be a different race.This social distance was magnified by other ways in which the police became more professional: police had to be better educated, and they had to pass tests, like other civil servants.They had to know something about their jobs.In the first decades of the century, August Vollmer, Police Chief of Berkeley, California, was a leader in the movement to upgrade the quality of the police.In 1916, Vollmer developed the “first formal academic law-enforcement program,” at the University of California at Berkeley.The program began to turn out “college cops” for Vollmer at a time when most policemen did not even have a high school diploma.5One of Vollmer’s most notable disciples was O.W.Wilson.He embodied the mixture of practical experience and university training that Vollmer pioneered.Wilson, the son of a Norwegian-American lawyer, started out as a patrolman in Berkeley.In 1928, he took over the police department of Wichita, Kansas, where he battled against corruption and preached the gospel of motorized patrol cars.At various times in his career he taught at Berkeley and Harvard, and served as a consultant to a flock of police forces
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